


next year all our troubles (will be outta sight)

by epochellipse



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Abandonment, Christmas, Coda 8x11, Episode Tag, Episode: s08e11 Oni Kalalea Ke Ku A Ka La’au Loa (A Tall Tree Stands Above the Others), Family, Gen, Parent-child relationships, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 14:13:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17163449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epochellipse/pseuds/epochellipse
Summary: And it might seem silly to him, with Gracie spoiled for good parental figures—kid can’t walk three feet without bumping up against a decent-to-great one, and only one bad apple in the bunch—except he knows the shock of it, how it hurts just as much every single time someone who was supposed to be there for you walks away.





	next year all our troubles (will be outta sight)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TetrodotoxinB](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/gifts).



> Set ~12 hours after the season 8 Christmas episode, Christmas Day. I haven’t seen any evidence in canon that Stan Doris-ed the kids, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he didn’t, so I went with it. I mean, for all I know—and knowing this show’s propensity for surprise mentions/appearances of characters everyone including the showrunners have forgotten—episode 13 could tell us Grace and Charlie have been visiting Stan and this whole thing could be jossed, but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> For TetrodotoxinB's prompt: _Steve feeling unloveworthy because both of his parents were terrible and Danny having to knock him metaphorically on the noggin for him to see that Danny loves him plenty._
> 
> I hope this is in line with what you wanted! I really wanted to put the kids in this one, and I thought this option dovetailed nicely with that. Sorry if most of Steve’s parental angst is implied or under-the-surface instead of overt, but I like my parallels and my subtext. Also, it’s pre-slash, because this ending wormed its way into my head and refused to leave. I hope you like it!

Somewhere in the lull between the excitement of opening presents and the moment the sugar hits Charlie’s system, Grace puts her phone in its brand-new case down on the arm of the couch and walks out the back door.

Danny and Charlie are busy playing with Charlie’s new remote-control car, Charlie shouting, “Faster, Danno!” but Danny sends a concerned glance toward the door Grace just disappeared out of. Steve meets his eyes and tips his head toward the door, and Danny gives him a little nod.

“Hey, Gracie,” Steve says as he eases the door shut and sits down next to her on the steps out back. “You okay?”

She stares out at the tree in the neighbors’ yard and shrugs one shoulder. “He didn’t send us any presents.” She doesn’t sound sad so much as tired. Kind of hollowed out. “He didn’t even  _call_  us.”

Stan. Steve puts a gentle hand on her knee, and she picks it up in both of hers, traces the veins on the back the way she did when she was little, the way Charlie still does. He never did that with his parents, doesn’t remember Mary doing it, either, and he wonders if it’s a Williams thing, or just another byproduct of how he and Mary were raised to think about touch.

“Charlie was  _so sad_ ,” Grace whispers, low and upset. “He wouldn’t stop crying.”

“I bet,” Steve murmurs, and turns to smooth his free hand back over her hair. Steve remembers his father breaking the news to Mary, that he was sending them away, remembers how she ran up into her room and wouldn’t come out all day. He’d heard her crying that night through the wall between their bedrooms, for hours. Eventually he’d gathered up all his blankets and stumbled in to sleep on her floor, and she’d joined him there, camping out in a nest of bedsheets like they did when they were little, as if they were chasing that feeling one more time. Charlie’s still little, but Gracie’s the same age he was, then.

Grace sniffs. “Like... is there something wrong with me?” she asks, voice watery.

Steve looks up at her. “Grace—”

She doesn’t look up from his hand as she interrupts him. She’s not moving it anymore, just holding on a little too tight. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I know Danno and my mom love me, but...” She pauses, and when she starts again her voice is smaller. She sounds lost. Steve hears it and knows it, that unmoored feeling when someone you looked to leaves you. A landmark she’s long used to orient herself within her world—something she trusted to be fixed, a constant—has been snatched from her sight. “He’s the only one who didn’t  _have_  to. Like,  _biologically_. And he left.”

“That’s not true,” says Steve, and he flips his hand and squeezes, catching most of her fingertips and a thumb. “I love you.”

“But if you and Danno stopped being friends, would you just... cut us out of your life?”

“I don’t think Danno and I will ever stop being friends, Grace,” says Steve softly, squeezing her fingers again. “But even if we did, you could still call me. For anything, whenever you wanted. If you were in trouble, or to tell me what you got for Christmas... hell, we could talk about the weather,” he says, smiling down at her. “I love  _you_. And I love Charlie. And I love having Danny over, and being here, but it’s always better when you guys come, too.” He squeezes her hands again. “Having all these people that I love in one place.”

They can hear Charlie laughing from inside, an excited shriek followed by Danny’s low answer. It brings a little smile to Grace’s eyes. She presses her head into Steve’s shoulder. “I love you, too,” she mumbles, half-muffled against his arm, before she pulls away.

They’re quiet for a while, Gracie still looking out at the tree and Steve looking at her, watching her face to make sure she’s okay. Like he could do anything at all if she wasn’t.

He sees the way her eyebrows dip, the way she moves her jaw. “Do you think he ever really loved me?”

“I honestly don’t see how he could  _not_.”

“But it  _feels_  like... like I was only ever worth anything to him because of my mom.” Steve’s hand twitches in her grip and she squeezes, a little, where she’s holding his thumb. He wonders if she  _knows_ , or if it’s just instinct for her, that kind of comfort, passed down through a million little touches to let her know she’s loved. “Like I’m not worth loving just  _because_.”

“Of course you are, Gracie. You and Charlie are the best kids in the world—and Joanie, obviously.”

She finally looks at him. “Some kids are out there curing cancer, Uncle Steve.” Her humor is dry sometimes, so much like Danny except when she’s nothing like Danny at all.

“Well, you’re  _my_  favorite kids in the world.” He knocks his knee companionably against hers.

The quiet settles around them, and they stay there until Charlie comes out and throws himself at them, high on Christmas spirit and way too much sugar. He lands in Grace’s lap with his knee jammed awkwardly into Steve’s kidney. “Gracie,” he says, “come try out my remotecontrolcar it’s reallyfun,” his mouth moving even faster than Danny’s, somehow. He scrambles back up, kneeing Steve in the thigh, and drags both of them inside by the hand.

Danny hands Grace the controller with a kiss to the side of her head when she goes to stand by him, Steve going to her other side. Danny meets Steve’s eyes over her head while she’s trying to get the hang of the controls, and Steve cants his head a little, knowing Danny will read the  _later_  as easily as if he’d said it out loud. Grace figures out the remote in short order, Charlie chattering instructions at her elbow a mile a minute, and she messes around with it for a little while. Pretty soon, she’s driving the car in ever-shrinking circles around the room. Charlie chases after it, starting to gain. “Look, Uncle Steve! I’m faster than a car!”

Grace tries to bank it, and the car flips over onto its side.

“ _Gracie_ ,” says Charlie reproachfully. He snatches the remote away from Grace and goes over to set the car back on its wheels, giving it a little reassuring pat.

Grace crouches down to look it over critically. “I think she’ll be okay,” she says, pushing Charlie’s hair back with both hands. He grabs one of them and hugs it. “Sorry, buddy.”

”It’s okay, Gracie,” he says magnanimously, still hanging off of her arm.

“I mean, Uncle Steve did help teach me to drive.”

“Hey!” says Steve, but he doesn’t really mean it. Danny side-steps closer to bump Steve’s shoulder in vindication. Grace just smirks at him, so much like Kono it hurts. Steve knows Kono talks to Grace more than any of them, that with the girls she sees everyday and their sad stories, talking to Grace reassures her. That some days, Gracie’s light keeps her from burning out.

It reminds Steve how many people have gone into making Gracie who she is. All the people who’ve handed her little bits and pieces of themselves to incorporate into herself, like a spider crab decorating its shell. He hates to think she may have lost something of that, now.

Steve had pieces from his father, once, and his mother, until she disappeared and he was made to leave all those years ago, not knowing the truth. He cast all that away, like nonessential cargo from a sinking ship, when his entire world shook apart and he was thrust into a strange place, his landmarks destroyed, uncharted waters both inside and out.

He knows the truth now. Sometimes, he thinks of his mother as dead anyway. To the shipwrecked fifteen-year-old still lurking somewhere inside him, she is.

And it might seem silly to him, with Gracie spoiled for good parental figures—kid can’t walk three feet without bumping up against a decent-to-great one, and only one bad apple in the bunch—except he knows the shock of it, how it hurts just as much every single time someone who was supposed to be there for you walks away. It shakes away something of yourself.

***

Danny looks at him while they’re wrangling up the wrapping paper strewn over the floor, the kids busy carting their hauls into their rooms to sort through. He cants his eyebrows in question.

“Stan,” says Steve, pursing his lips.

Danny laughs darkly. “Right? And I thought I hated him after he slept with my wife.”

Steve grimaces in sympathy. He knows that stung, but he knows, too, that Danny’s biggest regret about everything that’s ever happened between him, Rachel, and Stan, and the way they’re all snarled up with each other like tangled fishing line, is that his kids keep getting caught in the crossfire. “Charlie seems fine,” he says, a question in the scrunch of his eyebrows.

“Ah, yeah, well, that one did all his c-r-y-i-n-g at m-o-m’s. And of course, my awesome Monkey put on a brave face for her mom and her baby brother, but it’s hard to be the one that holds it all together, so I’m not surprised she needed a little break to process everything.”

“You gonna go talk to her?”

Danny straightens up with a scrap of reindeer-printed wrapping in his hand, the other hand pressed to his side, right about where Steve’s finger went into him—in Steve’s head a clinical voice echoes,  _between his fourth and his fifth rib_ , and the terror of that moment echoes, too—but he doesn’t say anything. Danny looks at him. “Did she seem okay when you guys left it?”

Steve scratches the back of his head. “I think so? It’s just... I’m not sure that I’m the one who should be talking to her about this.”

“What are you talking about, you’re the  _best_  one for her to talk to about this. Name a better person for her to talk to about this, because I can’t.”

“I just... I feel like kind of a hypocrite.” Steve starts bending to grab a knotted ribbon off the floor, and Danny tries to do the same with some tissue paper, but Steve stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Danny rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t try to bend down again. Steve goes back for the ribbon.

“Why would you feel like a hypocrite? You planning to skip town?” It’s a joke, but Steve can hear the edge of tension underneath it. Danny still has the reindeer paper clutched in his hand.

Steve stands up abruptly, before he even touches the ribbon. “Of course I’m not.”

“You wanna use your words here, then? Morse code? Semaphore? The manual alphabet?”

Steve shrugs. “It’s nothing.”  _I know it doesn’t make any sense_ , Grace had said.

“It is  _not_  nothing.”

Steve sighs as he finally snags the ribbon off the ground. “Can we just let it go.”

“Oh, yeah,  _letting it go_ , that’s what I’m known for,” says Danny, smiling over at him.

Steve grimaces. “You’re really gonna make me talk about it, aren’t you?”

“You wanna go grab your guitar, you can sing it to me instead,” Danny says, strumming a few times on an air guitar around the piece of reindeer wrapping paper he’s still holding. “I ain’t picky.” He hefts his imaginary pick and grins at his own pun.

Steve rolls his eyes and bats Danny’s hand down as he scopes out more junk to pick up. “Thanks for the capo, by the way.”

Danny snorts. “Thanks for thinking I’m an idiot. I know you’re trying to change the subject, don’t try and change the subject.” He wags a finger at Steve like someone’s very emphatic grandmother. “Please, explain this to me, because I am confused. How does you comforting Grace  _in any way_  make you a hypocrite?”

Steve balls up a big swath of wrapping paper between his hands, something to do while he collects his thoughts. Finally, he says, “I’m out there trying to convince her it doesn’t reflect on  _her_ , at all. And it  _doesn’t_ , I know that. It just reflects on Stan being an asshole. But.”

He stares down at Santa’s happy face crumpled up between his palms. Throughout his childhood, Steve’s father always took the Christmas shift, to let other men go home to their families, let them wrap their kids’ presents and kiss them goodnight.

John McGarrett was a good man. Steve just doesn’t know if he was a very good father.

He looks up at Danny. “Even the people who  _had_  to love me couldn’t stay. Didn’t want  _me_  to stay.” He lifts one shoulder. “I mean, one asshole leaves you, they’re an asshole. If everyone leaves you, maybe you’re the asshole.”

Danny stares at him for a second.

Steve drops his gaze.

So he’s not expecting it when Danny asks, “Why did I move to Hawaii for Grace?”

“What?” Steve asks, thrown.

“What are you, losing your hearing in your old age?  _Why_  did I move to  _Hawaii_  for  _Grace_?” Danny repeats with exaggerated patience.

“Because you love her,” Steve says, baffled.

Danny nods. “Yes. Yes, I do. Why did I give bone marrow to Charlie?”

“Because you love him,” says Steve, eyes narrowing as he tries to read Danny’s point in the lines by his eyes. He  _knows_  Danny’s not saying this just to rub it in, he knows that, but he has no idea where this is going.

Danny throws his hands out to the sides. “Why did I drag my ass off to North Korea for you? Why did I give you my fucking liver?” His arms wave around a little.

Steve stares at him for a second.

“Huh?” Danny prompts.

Steve rolls his eyes. “I get it, Danny.”

Danny makes  _fieldgoal_ arms. “He gets it! You get it, okay, so then tell me,  _why_?”

“Because you love me,” Steve grumbles. They’ve both said ‘I love you’ to each other, and he’s said that jokingly,  _shut up, you love me_ , after Danny insults his driving or calls him a gorilla, but he’s never said it straight like that before.

Danny doesn’t miss a beat. “That is correct. And I sure as hell didn’t have to. I didn’t even  _want_  to, because you got me  _shot_ , and you are  _a crazy person_. But you’re so fucking lovable I couldn’t resist. You dragged me up a fucking mountain just to show me something you love because you wanted me to love it too, how the fuck could I hope to resist that, huh? So there you go.” He tosses the piece of reindeer paper at Steve’s head. The scrap falls short by about a foot, and Steve catches it in one hand. “Danno loves Steve. Steve loves Danno. Danno and Steve love Grace and Charlie. Reverse that. Repeat ad nauseam.”

“Since then?” Steve asks, eyes wide. He knows he’s staring, but he can’t seem to stop. He thinks back to being airlifted off that mountain, Danny smiling up at him all those years ago. The grudging wonder in his eyes when he’d looked at the petroglyphs, then turned his gaze to Steve.

“That’s the first time I said it, isn’t it?” Danny huffs. “I don’t say it unless I mean it. What, you think I’m some gun-jumping twenty-five-year-old who goes bandying those words around everywhere when I don’t know what I’m about?”

“You drew me a heart in the air,” says Steve skeptically.

Danny rolls his eyes so hard Steve’s amazed they don’t pop out of his head. “C’mon, babe. Everyone knows I talk with my hands.”

He reaches over, and grabs Steve’s hand in his.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone else have non-sexual handholding kink, because boy do I.
> 
> My little sister/beta, upon receiving the first draft of this: HAHAHAHAHA my literal favorite thing about this is how it takes Steve "Navy SEAL" McGarrett like 45 minutes to pick up one (1) ribbon.  
> Me: HE CAN'T BE GOOD AT EVERYTHING, MARIE!
> 
> About the hand thing: I have had 26 siblings (20 of them foster siblings, 3 of them foster-to-adopt), and excluding the two infants and the one who came to us as a teen, all of them, bar none, including me, had like some kind of fascination with hands? The ones who hated hugs, and/or the ones who were on the spectrum (including me), all of them would happily grab a parent or older sibling’s hand and close their fingers into a fist one by one and then open them one by one, trace palm lines, pet the hair on the back of my dad’s hand, etc. And most of the ones who had histories of neglect would wrap this in the guise of “hey let’s compare hand sizes” or “I’m counting your freckles” but we all knew what they were doing. I’m also positive that many of these kiddos would not have done this with their birth parents. So my anecdotally supported opinion is that this is just something kids do, unless they know they’re not supposed to.


End file.
